An occasional foray…
This is my first, vain attempt at a gaming blog. As much as anything to give me a bit more hands-on virtual experience!
Here I will be laying out my rpg-related thoughts, trivia and nonsense. With a specific emphasis on my two gaming loves – Tunnels & Trolls, and Glorantha. Both date back to the earliest days of tabletop games and to some of my earliest gaming experiences.
Tunnels & Trolls (T&T) was the second rpg ever written and published – as far as I can tell because the author, Ken St Andre, could not make head nor tail of the original Dungeons & Dragons rules!
Glorantha first appeared in the board game White Bear, Red Moon (which was later re-released as Dragon Pass) before being the default setting for Chaosium’s Runequest roleplaying game, which was one of the Big Three in the 80s (along D&D and Traveller).
So my random musings on both will be appearing here (along with anything else geek-related I may turn my head to). In addition, this blog will be the testing ground/sounding board for my latest rpg project – mixing the two above and playing in Glorantha using the T&T rule set.
Currently my train of thought is to produce a set of Glorantha-specific T&T house rules, including Runes as Talents, no character types etc, which will be a conglomerate of T&T and Runequest (with more than a touch of Heroquest thrown in). I plan to use these to run the classic Borderlands set either online or at the table. This set of adventures has the PCs play mercenaries hired by the Lunar Duke Raus of Rone as he sets up his new home in the lands he has been so “graciously” granted by the Red Emperor on the Zola Fel river. No clan questionnaire and community-support to worry about here – players can roll up whatever characters they like and have them all thrown together for some old-skool fun. As I have described it to those I have mulled over the idea with, this is going to be Glorantha as a Saturday morning cartoon!!
Stay tuned!!
Tunnels & Trollkin 
I would suggest to mix T&T and Glorantha that you keep the types, and do the Rune Lord Talents around them. The character Type, (Wizard, Warrior and Rogue) is a hallmark of the specific FRPG. Without the specific traits of each Type, the notes will be re-worked RQ with inflated numbers.
Thanks for the feedback Tom. My thinking on doing away with character types is due to the nature of magic in Glorantha – as being something you get from emulating Gods or doing pacts with Spirits. I’ve never been happy with any of the sorcery variants produced though, so thought I might save T&T wizards for those damn meldeks! ;O)
Will post more on my thoughts on a magic system soon – I suspect it may end up being more HQ than either RQ or T&T.
The main reason for wanting to use T&T, and why I think it would be a good fit for old-skool Glorantha, is precisely because of the inflated numbers. In RQ, no-one ever got to Hero proportions, the system prevented you. In T&T it is positively encouraged!!!
Wha – ? Wow, Glorantha as a Saturday morning cartoon?! This sounds exciting!!
Now there are many eras of Saturday morning cartoons, so which is your goal. I have the suspicion it’s a “Masters of the Universe” genre (though I don’t believe MotU was on Saturday mornings originally; perhaps Thundarr would be more SatMorn)…but I’d love to see it based on the stuff we watched in 1959 on Saturday mornings: old WB cartoons, Fleischer Popeye cartoons, and Three Stooges short films!
*jeep! & God Bless!
–Grandpa Chet
Cheers Gramps! 😉 Hate to disappoint you but I suspect it is going to be a lot more Masters of the Universe than it is Mister Magoo! Although I do have in my head the image of a short-sighted Lunar merchant who drives around in a huge cart which he is barely in control of!!!!